Adding Support for Bitcoin Forks to Coinbase

We’re excited to announce our intention to support the withdrawal of Bitcoin Forks across Coinbase products in the coming months. We are announcing this both internally and to the public as consistent with our process for adding new assets.

This change will allow customers to more easily withdraw assets associated with Bitcoin Forks across all Coinbase products. We are not announcing support for any specific assets at this time.
As always, we look at technical, operational, and legal considerations
when deciding which Bitcoin Fork assets to support and will always state
on our website which particular assets are supported.

What Bitcoin Fork support means for our products

Coinbase Custody — will build infrastructure to support future Bitcoin forks. Note: Custody will likely support more forked assets than GDAX or Coinbase for the foreseeable future.

GDAX — will build infrastructure to support withdrawal of Bitcoin Forks for assets stored on GDAX at the time of the fork. Adding withdrawal support for a bitcoin fork does not mean the asset will also be added for trading. Assets that are listed for trading will be independently evaluated using the Digital Asset Framework.

Coinbase Index Fund— per the index methodology, any forked assets listed for trading on GDAX will be added to the Coinbase Index on a market capitalization weighted basis. Withdrawal-only forked assets, i.e. not added to GDAX for trading, will not be added to the index.

Coinbase — anticipated
infrastructure to support the withdrawal of Bitcoin forks for assets
held on the platform at the time of the fork. Per our previous guidance,
Coinbase will only list forked assets for trading after they are listed
for trading GDAX. It’s also worth repeating that listing on GDAX does
not guarantee listing on Coinbase.

Coinbase Commerce— customers of Commerce control and manage their own private keys, and Coinbase does not control access to forked assets. We have no plans to support any new forked assets in the Commerce UI.